Everything's Coming Up Miffs

Had a very long and tiring day yesterday, with work hosting the book launch for the new Andy Griffiths book What Bumosaur Is That?. Yes. You read that correctly. Although I've not read any of his work, he also wrote the famed novel (or so children inform me) The Day My Bum Went Psycho. This man has hit upon a gold mine and it is paying big time. Write books about bums and the world is your oyster. Or perhaps the world is your toilet into which you can poo all of your money.

So anyway, I spent the morning talking to kids, saying the words bum, poo and wee a lot (the launch was held in the old sewerage pumping station), walking up and down lots of stairs as I went from one side of the site to the other. So I was feeling pretty pooped (har har).

I had some safety training in the High Voltage Theatre late in the afternoon, followed closely by me running training for the public science show I've written for the school holidays (starting on Saturday).

This show has been a bit of a nightmare to put together, with things going wrong and falling apart all over the place. By yesterday, however, everything had pulled together and the show worked really well.

The show is about sound effects in the movies, and the idea was to play a clip from an out of copyright film and get kids down to make the sound effects. The holidays brochure had been at the printers long before we even knew whether the show was going to work, which meant we had to make it work.

The show is in an outdoor theatre, so immediately AV was going to be a problem. Our poxy projector just wasn't good enough. I managed to borrow an absolutely massive projector from our parent organisation (yay!) which I may just forget to return...

Next problem was the screen. I had the crappest overhead projector screen in the history of overhead projectors, which was both a death trap and looked like shit. So, again it was a case of "hello, parent organisation? you know how you lent me that really spunky projector? have you got a screen to go with it? you do? fabulous? can I have it now? and can you find some way of hanging it for me? excellent." Although the hanging solution didn't actually happen until yesterday, so I was slightly panicking that is wasn't going to happen.

Last major problem - and this was proving to be the big one - my team's lap top is old. and shite. and old. and shite. No USB port. No LAN port. Every time I'd try to play the movie clip on it something different would go wrong (lots of freezing, chugging, randomly not working for some reason). I couldn't borrow the Marketing lap top as one of them was going away and taking it with them. Woe is me! What to do? Then, magically, some nice little geeks from parent organisation showed up to upgrade and swap over some people's computers. They also had one very new and spanking lap top that was to replace old and shite lappy! And we didn't even know it was coming! This one even had wireless broadband! Yay yay yay!

Suddenly my life became a lot better, and my show went down without a hitch. Hurrah for fabulous AV stuff, hurrah for nice parent organisation, and hurrah for my fabulous show!